The UC Marketing Capstone Experience

July 2016

July 31, 2016

As I've been diving into creating a pitch deck to give to my client, I realized that what I was creating was a sales presentation rather than a marketing presentation. The entirety of this project has been a little bit different from the get-go since I am dealing with a non-profit that offers "services" to families, and I am creating a presentation to potential donors. I've had to continually change the language and my mindset about the contents of the field book: "product" becomes "service", "company" becomes "organization", and "competitors" become "other really great organizations that also support very worthy causes and still need donations also." So in essence, I am trying to "sell" a service to people who won't actually get anything from the money they put towards the organization. It's so much easier to sell a product and steal share from competitors!

Being that this is a sales pitch, the guideline Drew gave us for a marketing presentation - though useful for the future - doesn't really apply. The potential donors are not going to care about the Big Picture. As such, I took to the internet to get a handle on good sales presentations since I haven't taken a sales class yet and I'm generally unfamiliar with sales protocol. I found some very useful tools out there, and an interesting guideline for a 10 slide sales pitch. I was frustrated with myself for not figuring it out on my own, but realized that a rough draft that came into my head suddenly at midnight a couple of weeks ago was actually pretty similar.

This week I am meeting with my client and a few trusted others in order to have a preliminary run through of the presentation and gather feedback from potential donors on what is working and what isn't for a potential round 2 of presentation. I hope I can leave my client with a valuable tool to go forward with to secure more donations in the future.

July 28, 2016

We aren't presenting for another two weeks, but I've been making ad storyboards this week and will probably continue to next week. We have strong suggestions, some of which they've already started working on, so I know we're in line with what they are thinking. However, our client is lacking in static ads, which we will be focusing on. Next week, we are going over our web content suggestions with the web manager to ensure our suggestions are in line with what they are already doing and what they might change. We have a mini presentation prepared to give her, which uses their own competitive market research data interwoven with our own qualitative insights. I've even mocked up a frame sample for social media use.

July 27, 2016

The last few weeks have been filled with a lot of ups and downs. I went into a meeting last Tuesday with our client so confident that they would be satisfied with our ideas. I was wrong, very wrong. However, I have learned that in marketing (and life) that sometimes taking a few steps backwards is what you need to do in order to leap forward. I spent a lot of time panicking on the phone with Drew asking, "How will we satisfy our client, "how will we ever finish this project in 3 weeks?". Drew was patient and told me that in marketing we are supposed to challenge ideas and get reactions from our clients. We took this opportunity as a group to realign with our clients by making 3 crafting a Brand Strategy Road Map for our client and sending it back and forth until our it aligned with what our client was looking for. We now have clear direction going forward. Its now crunch time. Only one week before we do our run through with Drew and then one more week until our final Skype presentation with our client.

I am ready to leap now. Keep up the great work everyone, the finish line is in clear sight!

July 26, 2016

Ripinka and I have released our final survey and we need to find at least 100+ survey respondents in the next few weeks. We have had our firefighter contacts distribute the interview through their networks and some responses have been rolling in. We will need to continually remind them to remind their departments about the survey. Ripinka and I are also planning on approaching departments with which we have not had formal contact to see if they are willing to help us out. We are also distributing the survey online to firefighting communities and forums to generate respondents. We are limiting our respondents to only firefighters so respondents may be harder to generate than a survey for a consumer packaged goods product, but I remain confident.

We are beginning to compile our final deliverables for the BAILOUT team. Our final presentation is scheduled for August 15th at the moment. And we plan to schedule our presentation run through with Drew during the week of August 8th.

July 25, 2016

Our team met with Amy for the last time today before our final presentation. She shared with us some new data and explained the new approach to collecting research. Christ Hospital Marketing team is moving fast, pretty much covering all the bases we've covered so far in our suggestions to them. We see a lot of similarities in our marketing strategy and Christ's. We may not have the "wild" "out of the box" solutions Shelley (the VP of Marketing) had encouraged, but our vision and goals align very well with Christ's marketing FY17 plan.

Amy went over all the details, data, statistics, goals and future plans already set in stone for the upcoming year. We very briefly shared with her some of our solutions and insights but didn't want to give away all the details. Our team is meeting this week to start putting our Big Picture Plan into a cohesive presentation, following Drew's PowerPoint layout suggestion from last week's class.

We have decided a final presentation date and are awaiting Amy's confirmation.

After we sent out the modified version of brand strategy road map, we finally had some agreements on our projects, we decided to put more focus on collaboration and multi disciplinary approach when messaging for AACSRE,which is a a good thing for us, at least it proves that our deliverable are in align with our client's expectation.

However, I still have some concerns regarding the target audience that they want AACSRE to reach out to, from their current initiatives such as the emerging fellows program, on-line signage course or the signage journal, I don't see these activities can be attracting enough to catch the attention of the last two buckets. Also, from their brand ACADEMIC ADVISORY COUNCIL FOR SIGNAGE RESEARCH AND EDUCATION, there is not a strong connection between themself and their last two buckets. Though Patty never said they want to give up the last two buckets, in this case, we have to create a comprehensive strategy that can be used for all the four target groups, in other words, the communication strategies that we used for each target audience are different but the message that we convey to different groups are the same, I am not sure if we can do that in the final presentation, I have to talk to Mu and Mariah to think out a solution for that.

I believe we had an appointment with Drew next week to help us do the final modifications of our project, I hope we can address all the uncertain things by then. We took a lot of detours at first since there are some ambiguities regarding the big idea, hopefully we will deliver something that will be useful for our client and meet their expectations in the end.

This past week our team got a lot of work done and it feels good. We had a short meeting with our client to finalize the Asks we had come up with and we now have narrowed our Asks down to 4. Although they didn’t choose the Asks we were really excited about, we still have some interesting ideas for the Asks that are finalized and perhaps we might put the rejected Asks in the appendix for future use.

Our team met on Friday and Saturday and worked on the communication executions using the 8 Advertising patterns. A huge shout-out to Drew for allowing us to sit in on his SIT class that happened on Saturday and take help from the students with the executions. As expected the class helped us with some amazing ideas and it also helped us break the idea fatigue we were experiencing as a team. Sometimes it is really helpful to take help from an outside source as it gives a whole new perspective on things and it revives your thought process.

The work is far from over, we still have many kinks to iron out. We have 3 weeks to go and we have a lot of work to do. The plan of action is to finish fleshing out all the executions by the end of this week or by mid-next week leaving close to 2 weeks for an illustrator to design some of our final executions. By end of today, our team will be submitting a document outlining all the various Asks and some executions to the client to get feedback. We might also have a quick conference call with the client again this week to discuss the executions and check if we are headed in the right direction with them. We are really excited to present the ideas we have in our bag and hope that they strike a chord with client.

Last week we finalized our survey after testing. There were a couple of changes that were required in the survey and after making them our survey was all set to go. Our survey needs minimum 120 respondents for it to have a reliable analysis. The sample size is somehow making me very nervous. We had a tough time finding fire fighters for our qualitative interview and 120 seems like a very large number currently. We passed on the survey to all the firefighters we interviewed and one of them mentioned that he emailed the survey link to a group of fire fighters in 14 different counties. However, in the past 5 days we have managed to get only 21 responses. The number is worrying me. I also tried to contact a couple of groups on social media groups and registered firefighter forums and a few of them posted the link as well. We might need to think of a different alternative to get a good number of responses.

It is time for us to start putting all the pieces together. Ross and I have been trying to work on several communication strategies to get Bailout EVO successfully marketed. Till now our client has been extremely co-operative and supportive with the work we have done and we are hoping that he is convinced with the final deliverable as well.

The process of this Capstone Class and project has reminded me repeatedly of running a marathon. The first marathon I ran was in Chicago and even though it was October it was very very hot. The first half went great and I had a blast, taking in all the sights, signs, and energy from the event - I was full of positive thoughts and energy. Then suddenly at mile 14, I became utterly exhausted, overheated, dehydrated, and all I wanted to do was be done with this stinkin' race. "Why did I ever sign up for this experience? This is the worst!" I told myself over and over for the remaining miles of the race. I told my friends and family on the sidelines that had come to see me that I just wanted to die (certainly what every mother wants to hear from her daughter). Toward the end, the route turned right - away from where I knew the finish line to be. The last few miles were incredibly painful. But I had spent all that time training and all the money on the race that not finishing wasn't an option. I was trying to sprint the last mile on legs that, when I could feel them, were utterly tired and felt like jelly. I definitely wasn't sprinting by anyone's standard at that point BUT I was still running. I didn't get nearly close to my goal time, but finished that marathon and got my medal. And even though immediately after I crossed that finished line I swore I would never do something so stupid again as to sign up for a marathon, less than two hours later I was plotting how I would do things differently to be stronger and faster at the next one.

Similarly, I went out with a ton of energy for this project. Very excited, lots of research, etc. About halfway through I was ready to be done, telling my friends, family, and ridiculously patient boyfriend how much I am ready to finish it up and turn it in. And now, I am trying to sprint on tired legs for the last couple of miles. I am even feeling slightly that I'm turning away from the finish line right now - projects are taking a different turn than I would like at this point. But I've spent the last two years learning and gleaning all I can from my courses (not to mention paid tuition), and I am motivated to see it through.

The point is, I'm sure many of us are feeling as though we are sprinting on tired legs at this point in the Capstone. But the finish line is so close (which, by the way, is the worst thing you can say to a marathon runner at mile 24 when you are not running)! And it is possible and we'll all finish strong. And I'd be willing to bet that after we give our final presentations and submit the final reports and take a loooong nap, we will already be plotting on how to do better on the next project.

The power of teamwork is great. Our team went to Drew's Systematic Innovation(SIT) class. We "borrowed" his entire class to help us with generating ideas using their SIT knowledge from the class.

The focus are changing perception of consumer first impression at a store. We want to bring awareness of Always cotton top sheet pads in China and India. We want to change perception from Always is a protection brand and not as comfortable to Always is a also comfortable brand. We also want to change perception from Always is a mother's brand to Always is also for young ladies. With all these in mind, the class got divided into groups and work on different methods.

After only 20 minutes, the class came up with some really brilliant ideas. For instance, one idea for Indian market was setting dance footprints on the floor in front of the Always shelf in stores. The footprints correlate to famous Indian dance steps. Consumers who follow the footprints will complete a famous simple dance step routine. It's fun for the consumer. It will also keep the consumer at the aisle a little longer. Also, it implies that Always is fun and active. In India, people especially women love to dance. Indian people celebrate many occasions by dance, wedding, holidays etc.

There were many other great ideas. These ideas lead our team to great discussion and execution ideas after the class. We are exited to pitch these ideas to P&G team and get some feedback and move forward with executions.

My learning from this experience with the class collaboration was: Regardless, how smart you think you are. One person is wisdom can not beat a group people's wisdom.